


etchings on the canvas

by Nekositting



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Assault, Branding, Corpses, Dark, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Horcruxes, Inferi, Not Beta Read, POV Third Person Limited, Psychological Trauma, Tomione Kink Meme's 2k19 Valentine's Day Fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 19:46:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17731478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nekositting/pseuds/Nekositting
Summary: Hogwarts was nothing more than a graveyard. They had lost. Harry was gone, dead to them forever.And Voldemort was alive.





	etchings on the canvas

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt for this one is: "Possible trigger warnings for abuse, force, sexual assault (if forcing the Dark Mark) - Branding (Dark Mark)"
> 
> As you can imagine, this is going to be quite dark :)

Hermione dug her feet into the ground.

It was useless.

With a cry, the monsters dug their fingers into her shoulders and arms. They pulled at her, the unseeing eyes surrounding her enough to make a thrill of terror climb up her spine.

 _Inferi_.

Hogwarts was nothing more than a graveyard. They had lost. Harry was gone, dead to them forever.

And Voldemort was alive.

No. He was more than that.  He was _immortal._

_And he asked for her. He asked for her to be brought alive and unharmed._

Hermione cried out when she was shoved forward, her eyes sealing shut at the mounds of dead bodies lying in the Great Hall. Her knees hit the ground, a jolt of agony so fierce she feared her teeth rattled with the shocks.

Like a sacrifice awaiting its slaughter.

A skin-crawling sensation speared her, gooseflesh rippling across her bare arms and cheeks. Her skin was clammy with sweat, dirty and caked in blood.

_Breathe, Hermione, breathe._

Cold fingers clapped over her shoulders, forcing her to lean over her aching knees. It took everything she possessed not to open her eyes and look at the owners of those hands pinning her down. She didn’t want to know who they were.

_Didn’t want to see the faces of her friends. Not like this. Never like this._

“Hermione Jean Granger.”

All the air in her lungs fled her in an instant. Her skin puckered with gooseflesh, teeth catching on her bottom lip. Voldemort was here. He had come.

_And he was close. Closer than she wanted him to be. He had to be no more than a meter away._

It was unsurprising. Still, knowing that didn’t mean it made her fear easier to manage, to control. Her heart was thrumming too fast, her breaths shallow.

She didn’t open her eyes even when a slithering sound erupted in the silent room. She couldn’t. Her bravery had all but fled her.

Ron and Harry were dead.

She hoped hers would be quick.

“Look at me.”

His voice came from right above her kneeling form.

_No._

She grit her teeth, squeezing her eyes tighter than before. She was wandless. The sole survivor of this massacre, but she’d sooner bite off her own tongue and choke on her blood than comply. Harry wouldn’t have given Voldemort the satisfaction. She wouldn’t either.

“Don’t make me repeat myself, _girl_.”

Hermione’s lids snapped open against her will, as if his words alone were a compulsion. He was looming above her, just as she assumed. His red eyes were gazing into her, his slit nostrils and the jagged line of his mouth a fascinating kind of hideous.

There was nothing human in that face left. Nothing of the haunting images of Tom Riddle, Jr. she had seen in the shadows of the tent when she’d worn his locket.

Then, he smiled. Hermione cringed, the inferis' hold on her becoming brutal when she tried to pull away. There was something in his eyes now. Something _other_.

She couldn’t name it, couldn’t describe it.

But it was there, just beneath the pools of _red, red, red_ —

“Why am I still alive?” Hermione asked, jerking when Voldemort tilted his head to one side. The strange glimmer was still in his eyes. “What do you _want_?”

Laughter met her ears. It was low and serpentine. She could feel each _shhhhh_ of air escaping his parted lips across her spine. Hermione struggled to swallow down her fear, to mask the wave of revulsion that consumed her.

“You have something that belongs to me.”

Hermione blinked. Confusion superseded the fear coiling in her stomach. She didn’t understand. All she had were the clothes on her back. Her wand had been lost in the midst of battle, the screams of her friends being eaten alive by Inferi and werewolves all she could focus on as she ran through the open courtyard before everything fell into deafening silence.

“What?”

Voldemort cocked his head to one side, his smile stretching into a grin. The sight of his sharp and jagged teeth was enough to make her stomach churn with violence.

“Oh, you don’t _know_?” Hermione grimaced at the blatant mocking in his voice. “And here I was under the assumption that you were the brightest witch of your age.”

Anger ravaged through her within seconds. Hermione’s struggles renewed, a red film settling over her vision. The _audacity_.

How _dare_ he mock her?

At that moment, she didn’t care that she was being restrained by two of the most terrifying creatures in existence, that she was kneeling before the monster that had created them in the first place. None of it mattered.

“ _Fuck_ you.”

She didn’t know what possessed her to say those words. This wasn’t her. She was above this, above the crude and jagged shape of those syllables. But _Circe,_ did it feel good to say them.

His hand was in her hair before she could savor the spark of anger that flashed in his eyes. He yanked and Hermione cried out, her fingernails cutting crescents into her palms from the burn. Her scalp was on fire.

“You will mind your _tongue_.”

Hermione groaned aloud when his grip tightened, a sharp pain blooming over where he restrained her. He was going to tear the hair straight out of her scalp. Merlin. He was going to—

“Or I shall mind it for you.”

She was forced off her knees by her hair, strands tearing straight from her head. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill. She refused to let them. She swallowed back her pain, sucking in all the screams and the fears swirling in her stomach.

She glared straight into his eyes. Daring him to kill her. To end it without saying a word.

“ _Monster_.”

She didn’t know what possessed her. Why, why, why would she say this? This wasn’t her. This anger and pain and fear in her stomach was not her. She wasn’t reckless, she didn’t poke the bear and provoke its rage.

And yet—

“Kill me. What are you waiting for? I’m a muggleborn, the very thing you want purged from the _world—”_

Hermione’s angry rant died in her throat when Voldemort leaned in, his face so close she could see the thin veins beneath his skin and the gossamer of scales along his brow and chin.

_Oh god._

“ _Come out_ ,” Voldemort hissed, his eyes brilliant and inhuman and— _too bloody close—_

Hermione’s insides wrenched. Something had stirred inside her. Like someone had trapped a swarm of insects in the pit of her stomach.

“What?”

Her stomach jerked, and Hermione hardly felt the bite of Voldemort’s nails in her hair. A rush flooded her ears, the _thrum, thrum, thrum_ of her heart beating against her ribcage like a closed fist.

It hurt. An ache was building. She couldn’t put her finger on it. She didn’t know. Didn’t understand what was _bloody_ happening—

Voldemort’s face blurred, the sharp planes of his skeletal face smoothing into smudges along her gaze. His face came forward until it hovered near hers, until she could taste iron and charred meat in the back of her throat. His breath was death.

“ _Do not make me wait.”_

A jolt of electricity ripped through her, and Hermione couldn’t bite back her screams. They were endless, suffocating. Her stomach was twisting. _Oh god_. There was something inside her.

It moved and moved and writhed and spread through her.

_Yes._

A voice. It wasn’t her own. It couldn’t be her own.

It was a man’s and it was in her head.

_I know._

Tears streamed down her cheeks at the same time the strange twisting mass in her stomach began to climb higher, and higher, and _higher—_

It was between her breasts. It was in the hollow of her throat. It was in the back of her throat.

It was—

Voldemort’s lips descended on hers. His mouth was ice cold, his tongue forked and long delving into her mouth and _down, down, down_ her throat.

Hermione gagged, struggling but unable to do anything with her arms restrained. She could feel the Inferis’ cold and unyielding hold on her, could feel the bite of Voldemort’s nails forcing her head closer to his.

She bit down the very moment the surprise passed. Blood exploded in her mouth, bitter and thick on her tongue. She wanted to puke. She nearly did.

Voldemort’s hand wound around her neck and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. Voldemort’s eyes were spinning. Everything was twisting. She clenched her jaw, and the iron spread throughout her mouth—

Then, he was pulling away. The corners of his mouth were smudged with blood, his eyes burning with hatred and fascination and something else that made her close her eyes.

 _No_.

She’d seen that look before. How could she have forgotten it? When Tom had—

“How... _fascinating_.”

Hermione spat out his blood, the hand around her neck robbing her of any and all the choice words she wanted to make. _Fascinating_? Hermione wanted to scrape off the taste of his mouth from her tongue.

A pained and weak sound escaped her when the Inferi suddenly forced her forearm up, baring the unmarred skin to Voldemort’s gaze. She didn’t know what he wanted, what he planned. She was still reeling from the impromptu kiss, from the taste of blood and the strange stirring in her gut—

“K-kill me.”

Voldemort’s eyes snapped to hers, something flickering over his eyes that made her breaths cease altogether. Like his hand was still wound around her neck, choking her.

“No.”

Hermione’s lips parted, but no words came to her. For Voldemort had summoned his wand from his robes in a dramatic flourish, the tip of what could only be the Elder Wand pressing against her wrist.

Horror burst in her stomach.

_No._

“I will not.”

Pain like she’d never experienced before exploded around her—the tip of Voldemort’s wand both the start and end point of that agony.

She screamed, screamed, and _screamed._

_No._

Her spine arched until she felt like she would snap in half, until Voldemort’s red eyes and the cold press of the Inferi’s fingers melted away.

She was being cleaved in two. There was no other explanation. He was ripping her apart, was tearing out her soul from directly from her forearm.

 _No_.

She sobbed and choked on her tears, uncaring of how pathetic that looked, of how _weak_ she was. This was— _Merlin_ —she didn’t know how to describe it. All she knew was that she wanted it to end. She wanted it to be over.

And then it was.

She sagged in the Inferis’ hold, the sting of Voldemort’s fingers in her hair and bruising grip of the Inferi clutching onto her arms, muted. Her forearm was pulsing. Beating. Like a live heart.

She opened her eyes—wondering when she’d closed them at all—and looked. Forced herself to look through the blur of her own tears and the ghost of that pain in her body.

Hermione froze.

_No, no, no. Good Godric._

A dark and smudged blob rested on her wrist. There were hints of red surrounding the skin, swollen and bleeding and burning—

Hermione gagged, her own bile climbing up her throat.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. None of this _could be fucking real._

“Lord Voldemort rewards those that please him. And you—”

Hermione cried in earnest when his hand released her hair to finger a loose curl that was pressed against her throat.

“—have pleased him greatly.”

He pulled his hand away, then, his lips stretching into a familiar smile that made her stomach wrench with recognition. She’d only ever seen it on one person. On one individual.

Hermione felt her heart stop.

“No.”

“Oh, Hermione, dearest. I _warned_ you—” His arm wound around her waist at the same time the Inferi released her. She didn’t move. She was frozen in mute horror. He was— _oh god._

“—wearing me would leave its mark.”


End file.
